What a Year

Let's reflect on how different Canadian politics looks from January 2025

A year ago today, I did some radio interviews on the start of the Liberal leadership race following Justin Trudeau’s January 6 resignation. Things were moving so rapidly that I affixed sticky notes with the names of possible candidates on my desk to keep track of all the players. They were in columns of “declared,” “maybe,” and “not running,” and ready to be moved if news broke in the middle of the interviews.

That was a fast time in Canadian politics. In the first four months of 2025 this substack had ten posts: eight on federal politics including the April 28 election, and two on the Totally Unnecessary Election in Ontario.

But then things slowed down. I only made seven posts over the remaining eight months of 2025, including a reflection of my treeplanting summer of 1990 and a detour on Korean democracy that I urge you to still read. While horrid chaos has been the order of business south of the border, Canadian domestic politics has a calmness quite different from a year ago. After the whirlwind of 2025, let’s assess where we are.

First and foremost is our dear leader. I’ll admit when I was doing those radio interviews last January the words “Prime Minister Carney” seemed inconceivable to me, but here we are. Carney seems to be enjoying his entry-level job into politics, doing things like getting out on the Rideau Canal and visiting a skate sharpening shop, where the global banker with the London suits hit the right note: “The smell of sharpening skates takes me right back to my days at the rink growing up.” The only additional thing he could have done was to be holding a Timmies.

Carney can enjoy a little fun on the weekend since no one doubts for a second that our prime minister is a Serious Man. He is reported to be a very tough boss, is constantly flying off for sombre meetings with other world leaders, and gives off a sense of relentless focus on the Most Important Thing, and there is no doubt what that is. Beyond fringe conspiracy theorists convinced he is a World Economic Forum plant, it’s hard to find anyone who actively dislikes Carney on a personal level, even if they didn’t vote for him. And though he wanted the job for years, he now comes across as a unusual politician who has stepped up for a very specific purpose and mission, not just a thirst for power. For the moment is Captain Canada, though he’s too serious for anyone but me to make such a facetious remark.

Prime Minister Carney doing serious things

In contrast, while there were so many things about 2025 we did not expect, Justin Trudeau hooking up with Katy Perry still stands out. I’m happy for these folks living their Instagrammed private lives, but dating a fading pop star is certainly an interesting way for Trudeau to double-down on his existing celebrity image and dilettante legacy.

More broadly, if a space alien descended into Ottawa and observed Carney and Trudeau, they would refuse to believe they headed the same party. The Liberal Party of Canada has reached new heights lows parameters in its perennial flexibility, swinging back to business liberalism and jettisoning numerous Trudeau policies (carbon tax? what’s that?). If this was a more paper-based era, the dumpsters in downtown Ottawa would be filled with discarded Trudeau policy papers. The swing from a year ago is breathtaking in its audacity.

Then there’s Pierre Poilievre, who would prefer you forget 2025 completely. Imagine the headline “Tory MP defects to Liberals” a year ago - inconceivable! More than once this substack has optimistically hoped for growth in the Conservative leader beyond being a purpose-built machine to bring down Katy Perry’s boyfriend, but evidence is slim. Yes, he won the most Conservative votes ever in the election, but his grip on the party is weaker than a year ago as he rides the tiger of discontent on the Canadian right. I continue to believe he will comfortably prevail in the upcoming leadership review. But he is much weakened from a year ago, a complete reversal from what seemed inevitable.

I’d also like to remind you that a NDP leadership race is currently underway, with five candidates including three plausible frontrunners, none of them prominent names unless you count Avi Lewis, whose grandfather once ran the party but who has twice failed to actually get elected himself. New Democrat races are family affairs in the broad sense as well. The clannish party doesn’t wash its dirty linen in public and its factions are complicated, all of which doesn’t help garner interest in the race for a party that doesn’t even have official status in the House. The NDP’s decline and crisis was already very evident a year ago, but not this bad. Still, the NDP is the most actual party-like party in Canada, at least federally, in the sense of an institution greater than whoever happens to be leading it. This will be its salvation, especially as the party can really only go up at this point. (A glimmer of hope is that the two Conservative defections to the Liberals slightly realigned the Commons seating plan, so now the NDP can at least sit together - they were ignominiously split between two sides at the back, mostly under the overhang where they couldn’t even be seen from the seats above.)

Finally, let’s all gather for the big sendoff to Chrystia Freeland, who continues her career with a new stint advising Ukraine, though - in a throwback to the way of doing business under Trudeau - no one seems to have thought through the issues of doing so while still a Canadian parliamentarian. Her embarrassing 8% showing in the leadership race was unseemly for a former deputy prime minister, and one wonders if a man with the same resume would have done so badly. Still, Freeland was arguably a better minister than actual politician. And her break from Trudeau in December 2024 was the catalyst that made so much else happen.

There’s so much else we could say about the differences in Canadian politics from a year ago. We don’t have time to get into how Doug Ford has become Canada’s pitbull down south, with a communication shop that managed to anger Donald Trump and shut down trade negotiations with a perhaps-too-clever Ronald Reagan ad. But one place that does look much like a year ago is Alberta, where the Smith government continues doing the things it does; if you had predicted a year ago that Elections Alberta would approve a referendum question on separatism, few would have batted an eye. Once again, the Wildrose Province is the exception and has stayed much on its course, even if many find that alarming.

Predictions for 2026? Are you kidding? I don’t have enough sticky notes for that.